Holly Hill Farm in Cohasset offers farm-to-table dinners

Wednesday

May 15, 2013 at 12:01 AMMay 15, 2013 at 3:10 PM

A recent dinner, made almost entirely with produce grown on the farm or nearby, was billed as an Asparagus Festival, and chef Robin King of Restaurant Oro in Scituate designed the menu based on the seasonal vegetable.

Kristen Walsh

This past February, Deanna Levanti spent her nights waking up every four hours to feed the wood stove in the frigid greenhouse on Holly Hill Farm. She was trying to keep thousands of seedlings alive so they could be planted outside come spring.

On Saturday, Levanti got to see the fruits of her labor, literally, as the farm hosted its first farm-to-table dinner of the year.

The dinner, made almost entirely with produce grown on the farm or nearby, was billed as an Asparagus Festival, and chef Robin King of Restaurant Oro in Scituate designed the menu based on the seasonal vegetable.

King grew up in Scituate, and will be sending his 5-year-old son, Owen, to a camp at Holly Hill this summer. He said he was thrilled to be part of an idea that is catching fire across the South Shore and the country, bringing food from the farm to the table and allowing diners to interact with the farmers who grow the food and the chefs who prepare it.

“To do something local and totally focused on fresh foods is right up my alley. I want my son to realize food comes from places like this and not Shaw’s or Stop & Shop,” King said.

King was recently named one of America’s best chefs as voted by his peers in a new book published by Best Chefs America. He brought three members of his restaurant team to the farm, and they worked under tents in drizzling rain, using a borrowed backyard grill from his parents and rented china to serve a gourmet meal to more than 50 guests.

Those guests milled around the farm, sampling wine from jam jars and enjoying Duxbury’s Island Creek Oysters on the half shell outside the barn built in 1785. When they moved inside the barn, to sit under white lights at candle-lit tables, the oyster shells, paper napkins and squeezed lemons were all gathered to be composted at the farm, along with all the other food scraps from the evening.

The menu included passed appetizers of local goat cheese and asparagus on focaccia, arugula salad with shaved asparagus, pickled radish and onions and poached eggs. The eggs were gathered from Holly Hill’s chickens just before the salads were made.

The main course was honey brined pork loin with asparagus risotto, roasted turnips and asparagus. Dessert was a strawberry rhubarb panna cotta, made with 10 pounds of Holly Hill rhubarb.

At the table, Levanti said the arugula, generally ready later in the summer, was grown in her greenhouse starting in February. She and other staff members helped serve the meal, and took guests on a short walk to the asparagus fields to show them where the food came from.

A Braintree High School graduate, Levanti studied environmental science in college before pursuing her dream of becoming a farmer.

“To do something sustainable and improve our food system is what I want to do,” she said. “To be here and see everyone eating the food I grow is very special.”

Holly Hill Farm is owned by the White family, and since 2000 has been a certified organic farm. Its 140 acres include walking trails open to the public, as well as a variety of animals that guests can visit when they pick up gardening supplies or seedlings.

Building a relationship with the community is a major part of the farm’s vision, and along with the dinners, it works with local schools, summer camps and food pantries, including Father Bill’s Place in Quincy.

“My parents were the ones who started the organic farm in 1998. There’s nothing like coming to the farm, getting whatever is in season, and it’s so fresh,” said Jean White, the family matriarch who lives a quarter-mile walk through the fields.

White, along with the entire staff of Holly Hill, said she believes the dinner demonstrates the farm’s mission: To become a farm family with members of the community, to be able to work together and share the benefits and joys of that work, in this case, the food.

The event raised money for Friends of Holly Hill, a nonprofit group that raises money for community outreach, scholarships and education programs.

Tickets for the dinner were $75 for members of the farm and $85 for nonmembers.

The next dinner is scheduled for July 27.

For more information on Holly Hill Farm and the programs it offers, visit www.hollyhillfarm.org.

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